THE LESSON: DON'T BE AFRAID, BE WARY

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Gianni Versace did not make his legend by aping the behavior of others. Yet there was one custom of his peers he might have done better to observe. "Such a high-profile guy," says Bo Dietl, head of a large New York detective agency. "He had to be crazy not to have security." One of Dietl's colleagues disagrees. "What could Versace have done differently?" asks Anthony Pellicano, a Los Angeles security consultant. "I'll tell you what. Nothing. Zero. If someone has the wherewithal, the time, the motivation and the skills to kill you, you are probably dead."

Yet Gavin de Becker, who has protected the likes of John Travolta and Cher, prefers not to discuss the security of public figures. He'd rather focus on his new book, The Gift of Fear, whose premise is the idea that his methods are not just for the wealthy and powerful but are equally applicable to the general public. The general public has responded by putting his book on the best-seller list.

For decades, Americans feeling uneasy about crime belabored government and the police about soaring murder rates. As is now well-known, the authorities and some favorable social trends have done their work, and the violent-crime rates have fallen dramatically. Yet the unease remains--correctly, some scholars think. American crime rates still dwarf those of other industrial democracies. Moreover, in 1995, the percentage of murders committed by strangers was at a startling rate of 55%. Jack Levin, director of the Program for the Study for Violence at Northeastern University, notes that fear responds to crime quality as well as quantity. "It's the large body counts," he says, "it's the fact that more strangers are [dying] on a random basis; it's 12-year-old boys killing for a pair of sneakers...nasty, brutal crimes, acts of sexual sadism, stalking, serial murders, vengeful employees who come back to the workplace." Concludes Levin: "People are desperate for solutions."

De Becker has solutions to spare. Fear's main idea is that our intuition of danger is a "brilliant internal guardian" that can be honed to a fine point. But there is also practical advice on a variety of crimes on Levin's list, and some that might as well be: assault by a stranger, stalking, rampages by co-employees and demon baby sitters. (A truly spectacular serial-killer case seems thrown in for seasoning.) Some of the counsel is self-evident: Beware of strange men offering unwanted favors or fake solidarity. Learn to say, "I said NO!" But a four-part test for assessing the possibility of violence is less obvious and more useful. De Becker, a compulsive systemizer who has sold the Supreme Court his MOSAIC-2 computer program for risk assessment, offers 17 signs that a worker may become violent, and 30 predictors for murder within a marriage. He urges battered wives to flee but argues eloquently against the knee-jerk use of temporary restraining orders, which, he notes acerbically, "work best on the person least likely to be violent anyway" and enrage the rest.

De Becker may be most informative on stalking, the quintessential crime for an alienated age. A million women and 400,000 men were stalked in America in 1996. De Becker advises stalkees to administer one brush-off and engage in no subsequent contact. Discouragement by a male friend, he reports, usually backfires. Don't change phone numbers--the stalker "always" finds the new one--but invest in a second line, arming the first with an answering machine. "The stalker won't realize you've changed, and you'll have a record of his calls if you need it."

Northeastern's Levin predicts that "the security industry is a growth industry into the next millennium," and that sector's huge current profitability supports the prophecy. Ads for De Becker's latest book also trumpet "Gift of Fear Seminars," and although some may find his approach too theoretical or mistake his emphasis on prevention for blaming the victim, he will probably make a lot of money and save a few lives.

It may seem almost churlish to wonder what sort of jumpy society will result from so many people becoming so sensitized to potential violence. De Becker claims that a calmly employed intuition, bolstered by knowledge, is actually "the exact opposite of living in fear." He describes a woman who was unjustifiably unnerved when he joined her in an elevator. "A man who gets into the elevator on another floor," he writes, "a man who gives her no undue attention, who presses the button for a floor other than the one she has selected...who stands a substantial distance from her, is not likely to hurt her without giving some signal." If she'd read his book, she would have been able to unclench. That is, until the next human appeared on the horizon.

--Reported by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York

With reporting by ELAINE LAFFERTY/LOS ANGELES AND ELIZABETH RUDULPH/NEW YORK